Whole Signs Today

waybread said:

JupiterAsc, I have a super idea. Since you are such a proponent of the whole signs house system, howbeit you take a chart of a public figure everyone would know, and then compare the interpretations you get out of whole sign houses, vs. out of another common system such as Placidus? Post both charts. Surely you have worked extensively with whole sign houses as well as some alternatives prior to expressing such uncompromising opinions. I would find your readings to be really interesting and helpful.

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How's this for an equally super idea! Since you are clearly interested in such an exercise, read Valens and process the information thoroughly... then you'll be able to, for yourself, complete the assignment you suggested, without my assistance.

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/Vettius Valens entire.pdf (link to entire Vettius Valens online translation

Why would I need your "assistance" to make up my mind? I've already done so.

I read your post as that you do not feel comfortable enough about whole signs to accept my challenge. Post a chart, do the whole sign interpretation, and I'll risk my reputation interpreting the same chart with Placidus, possibly backed up by an additional house system other than whole sign, depending on the birth latitude.

For anyone who is interested, an English translation of Valens's Anthologies can be found here: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/Vettius%20Valens%20entire.pdf . There's no index, so you have to scroll down a bit to find what Valens says about houses. Note that the word that some classical astrologers used for our modern meaning of "sign" translates literally as "house", and some English translators have kept this usage, despite the potential for confusion. It doesn't necessarily mean that the author used whole-sign houses: you have to infer their house system from whatever they say about houses in the modern sense. In the case of Valens, oftentimes he really does mean signs rather than houses.

Valens gets to a discussion of houses in our sense in Book I around about sections 4 and 5, where the literal translation appears to be "place." He talks about the "place" of the "bad daemon" as our 12th house, for example.

However, the translation suggests that Valens (or at least his translator) frequently conflated (used synonymously) his words "sign", "house", and "place". This might naturally give rise to the assumption that Valens used whole sign houses.
On the other hand, since his pronouncements about houses involve material like the following on the 9th house, perhaps we might argue that Valens was not the last word on astrological houses, at least not for people living today:

"If benefics happen to be in this Place and have been assigned the Ascendant or Fortune, the native will be blessed, reverent, a prophet of the great god; in fact he will be obeyed like a god. ....But if malefics are in conjunction and rule the previously mentioned places... or if they are in aspect from the right with the Lot, the native will be a tyrant: he will found some cities; he will sack others; he will pillage many people most wickedly."

If you read through the rest of Valens's descriptions of what the native will be like depending upon which planets he has in the various houses, some of them bear little relation to our usage of them today, even by modern astrologers. For example, he calls the second house (our "money house") "the Gates of Hades" and sees it as an evil house for both malefic and benefic planets.

But JupiterAsc, I am really curious to learn what you make of Valens's discussion in Book 3, part 2, where he literally describes the Porphyry house system!! In this system, the angles start the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th houses, then the quadrants are divided equally by 3 to get the rest of the houses. Valens goes so far as to say:

"Now to me the following method seems more scientific: take the distance from the degree in the Ascendant to IC, calculate one-third (as previously stated), then count from the Ascendant in the order of the signs, and consider these degrees and those in opposition to be powerful. Now consider the other [one-third] portion of the degrees to be average, neither completely good or bad, because this region 1)follows the Ascendant, 2) is [the III Place..., 3) is in opposition to [the IX Place] ...."

What Valens describes here, based on the Porphyry house system, is the traditional belief that angular houses were strongest, followed by succedent and cadent houses as weaker. This idea is common to traditional astrology; but what is of note is that Valens did not recommend the whole sign system in this passage. Interestingly he says, "Orion explained all of this in his book," suggesting that the Porphyry system predated both Porphyry and Valens (who was a contemporary of Ptolemy.)

So if Valens sees the Porphyry house system as "more scientific", who am I to argue?​

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Btw, I've just finished Avelar and Rebeiro's recent textbook on traditional astrology. They don't use the whole sign method.

waybread said:

Why would I need your "assistance" to make up my mind? I've already done so.

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if you have already 'made up your mind' and need no "assistance" then why post the following request?

waybread said:

JupiterAsc, I have a super idea. Since you are such a proponent of the whole signs house system, howbeit you take a chart of a public figure everyone would know, and then compare the interpretations you get out of whole sign houses, vs. out of another common system such as Placidus? Post both charts. Surely you have worked extensively with whole sign houses as well as some alternatives prior to expressing such uncompromising opinions. I would find your readings to be really interesting and helpful.

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I have frequently posted the link to the online Valens pdf - yourself or anyone interested may then follow your suggestion and "compare interpretations" for themselves without my assistance (and/or - as you said - helpfulness)

JUPITERASC said:

How's this for an equally super idea! Since you are clearly interested in such an exercise, read Valens and process the information thoroughly... then you'll be able to, for yourself, complete the assignment you suggested, without my assistance.

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/Vettius Valens entire.pdf (link to entire Vettius Valens online translation

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A study of early Greco Roman texts demonstrates that the terms house, sign and place were synonymous with each other-they meant one and the same thing.

Valens is known to have used a quadrant method (triisection of arc) as a tool in the evaluation of angular strengths of planets, but NOT in erecting the delineative chart. Quadrant division for angular evaluation can be found in Manilius, and can be traced as far back as Hypsicles (mid-2nd century BC) But these were TOOLS in delineation, and only by the early 6th century AD did we see these tools of evaluation become delineative houses (understood in the more modrn sense), and the concept of the IDENTITY of house with sign, began to fade away and become replaced by the concept that houses were "something different" than sign-places.

Greco/Roman astrology also had a "in what context?" approach to allocation of meanings to places/houses: we find this from the very beginning (in the extant literature) with Manilius: in a "raw" chart, meanings allocated to houses/places 1 through 12 were quite different than the meanings allocated to the same houses/places in the Fortunata chart (Valens somewhat continued to follow this procedure) Only later did houses acquire a "same within all contexts" allocation of meanings. Indeed, early Greco/Roman astrology was a more flexible creature-a more symbolical/analogical system- than what developed later in medieval, Renaissance, Reformation and modern times, where an increasing literalism and mechanisitic outllook came to characterize Western astrological thought and practice.

Same change in concepts happened in Vedic astrology: all historical and original-document evidence indicates that as late as the 6th century AD, the concept rasi=sign=house=place, dominated. However in Vedic the quadrant house system never developed: the original sign/house/place (whole sign) format simply morphed into the related Equal house format (around the 7th-8th century) which remains the predominant house system in jyotsih to the present day.

When the Chinese use houses (in some of the several Chinese astrological approaches), these too have always been "whole" (one animal sign to every 30 degree "palace", as they often call their "houses") Quadrant house formats are totally unknown in Chinese astrology up to the present time.

Now, I am not defending Valens (there are quite a few statement in Valens which I myself do not go along with), nor am I attempting to convince others about the glories of whole sign! As I have stated before, I could care less whether or not it was the original house format system-don't care if some guy came up with it 20 years ago out of the blue, because all I care about is that for me it is superior to any other house system format. But with the historical evidence backing it up, not only in the West, but also in the older Vedic and still to this day in approaches to Chinese astrology, it makes me think to myself, yeah, maybe these oldtimers had it right after all, and maybe we became so methematically advanced, coming to believe that more complex = more "true", more "accurate", that we have lost sight of what actually "worked best"...


(Note: Traditional astrologers rarely use whole sign or Equal house; the vast majority use quadrant houses, especially Regiomontanus; some use Alchabitius; a small number use Placidus; neo-Hellenists use whole sign more often, but even this tiny group of practitioners mostly use quadrant house systems like Porphyry or Regiomonatnusl; as mentioned above, most Vedic astrologers use Equal house, with a very small number still using the ancient whole sign format of the ancient maharishi's)

To put it more bluntly, JupiterAsc, I encourage you to step up to the plate. You've been a big proponent of whole sign houses and a big critic of anything else. I should think you would happily demonstrate the superiority of your chosen system. Telling people simply to read Valens truly doesn't cut it, for reasons partly outlined in my previous post. Valens isn't here to do a chart reading, and it isn't clear from his text that he even favoured whole signs. Many of his character delineations seem totally wierd in light of 21st century sensibilities. I am sure you'd have a better understanding of chart-reading in the 21st century.

Of course, if you are not up to the challenge, that's different. It's OK to say so.

Dr. Farr, I am not sure how to read the first part of your post. For sure, English translations of house, sign, and place can use these terms interchangeably, but once we grasp what the authors of yore were talking about, it becomes pretty clear when they meant "signs" and when they meant "houses" in our current sense; and these did not mean the same thing to them.

Someone might have the sign of Pisces in "the house of the good daemon" but this didn't mean that the classical astrologers conflated the terms. They didn't mean that having the sign of Aquarius in the "house of the goddess" (3rd house) gave them identical meanings. Probably you are not suggesting this, but I couldn't tell for sure.

I don't think that meanings of houses have ever been entirely agreed upon, even today. The 10th house, for example, seems to have gone from a primary meaning of one's public image and honours to one's career in the sense of a job in modern times. The 9th house shifted from the "house of god" to almost neglecting prophecy as one of its early meanings, merely in favour of overseas travel. But I agree such meanings today tend to be pretty literal, even material.

I don't think it is entirely fair to equate the whole sign system with "the old timers."

According to Deborah Houlding (a traditional astrologer), in The Houses: Temples of the Sky, houses probably were not in widespread use at all until "the dawn of the Christian era." If the Dendera zodiac (50 BC) is anything to go by, the Egyptians had a constellation-based astrology, using constellations both on and off the ecliptic. No houses. Manilius (1st century AD) clearly uses constellations in addition to signs and houses. Ptolemy (2nd century AD) says so little about houses that it is actually a stretch to declare how he understood them. As Valens (2nd century AD, and Ptolemy's contemporary) clearly attributes what came to be known as the Porphyry system to an earlier source, it must have co-existed with the whole sign system for quite a while. Some early authors give an 8-house system.

Rhetorius the Egyptian (early 6th century,) Astrological Compendium, gives what later became known as the Alcibitius house system. Interestingly, he cites Ptolemy as the source for some of his calculation methods. This suggests to me that house division in antiquity was a fluid process, or a work in progress, in which newer astrologers built upon the work of earlier authors.

But the antiquity of a given system, however, is really a red herring in the matter of horoscope interpretations. The question is, which produces the most accurate results? And here I think the answer lies with the proclivities of the individual. It is like asking, if you go horseback riding, do you prefer an English or western style saddle? If you like playing keyboard instruments, do you prefer the piano or organ?
Each might be better for specific purposes but it is hard to make a case that one is always and objectively better than the other.

A house and a place were the same for the ancients, and with a concrete chart they referred to the place of a sign as the house of the sign; Aquarius in the 3rd place is positing the "place of the Moon goddess", and everything connected with the "place of the Moon goddess" IN THAT CHART would be defined by the qualities of the sign (Aquarius) that composed that place. This concept is very clear especially in Manilius.

There really is not much in the extant literature to support that there were divisions or conflicting theories in antiquity regarding types of house format systems, until after 500 AD, when Olympiodorus first broached that a few astrologers (notice that qualification) had taken the former TOOL for evaluating angular planetary strength (tri-section of arc) and had begun to use it as the basis of chart delineation (ie, the "Porphyry"method)

The issue of the existence of "8 house systems" has been demonstrated as a likely historical fallacy in a rather extensive critical analysis in the introduction (Loeb library edition) to Manilius "Astronomica" (qv)

Also, historically, relative to Egyptians and Babylonian astrology, the record demonstrates that in addition to their undoubted starry constellational astrology, each ancient system also used a kind of house system, based on the equatorial division of the circle of the sky (rather than the ecliptic-in this they were similar to the Chinese), on what we might term "houses": in Babylon these were fixed, exact 5 degree areas of the circle of the sky, invariant in size, each of which had certain meanings attached to it affecting whatever planet or star passed through it (these were called "facets", source of the later term "faces') The Egyptians had the same type of thing, fixed 10 degree areas of the circle of the sky, called "decans", invariate, each of always the same size (10 degrees), entirely seperate from asterism or constellational considerations, and each of which also had certain meanings and would modify the influence of planets or stars passing through them. These Babylonian and Egyptian concepts-we might call them "whole houses", like the Chinese "palaces"-far predated Denderah (estimate of Denderah is between 50 and 100 BC), at least by 1500 years (or more)...So perhaps we see a forerunner of our "houses" in these invariant degree areas ("facets", "decans") from ancient Egypt and Babylon.
But unlike quadrant houses, these were always the same size (5 degree facets, 10 degree decans), JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE SIGN HOUSES ARE ALWAYS THE SAME SIZE (30 degrees)

I fully concur that the antiquity of anything doesn't matter for much in PRACTICAL astrological work, and what works best and most reliably for the individual practitioner, is really all that matters. I am just saying that for beginners, try out whole sign first; for others, I say, if you are using a house system (or NO HOUSE system like Cosmobiologie) and it works to YOUR great satisfaction, STICK TO IT, and file all other arguments for other methods away, in the dustbin!

So when you wrote the following

waybread said:

JupiterAsc, I have a super idea. Since you are such a proponent of the whole signs house system, howbeit you take a chart of a public figure everyone would know, and then compare the interpretations you get out of whole sign houses, vs. out of another common system such as Placidus? Post both charts. Surely you have worked extensively with whole sign houses as well as some alternatives prior to expressing such uncompromising opinions. I would find your readings to be really interesting and helpful.

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what you actually meant was

waybread said:

To put it more bluntly, JupiterAsc, I encourage you to step up to the plate.. You've been a big proponent of whole sign houses and a big critic of anything else.

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However, this is an astrological discussion forum where I, in common with all other members, am entitled to post an opinion on any matter under discussion.

I now draw your attention to the following important general advice quote from a Moderator

wilsontc said:

All
Quite often people will disagree with each other. As long as your discussions are respectful and you keep to your own opinion. And if others have differing opinions, then that is part of the astrological discussion.

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for a number of reasons, the following comment is an interesting one

waybread said:

Of course, if you are not up to the challenge, that's different. It's OK to say so.

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If you wish to make such an inaccurate inference you may of course do so in any event you re-iterate http://www.astrologyweekly.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39669

Déjà Vu

waybread said:

All right, sports fans. Is anyone ready for a real cage match between whole signs and Placidus in predictive astrology?? (or post-dictive, in this case.)

I post some charts for Queen Elizabeth II. The birth times of the British royal family are closely timed. Their lives are highly public. QE2 has lived most of her life, so there is little guessing about how it will turn out.

For a fair test, predictive astrology shouldn't look at a date that affects an entire cohort; and it should be something unanticipated. One of Elizabeth's major unexpected moments came on February 6, 1952 when her father died while she was traveling in Kenya, making her simultaneously a bereaved daughter and the queen of the British Empire. She was touring in Kenya at the time. Her actual coronation occured the following year, but her ascending to the throne was immediate. (Another interesting date would be Jan 20, 1936 when her uncle abdicated, putting her directly into the line of succession.)

I've used the Astrodienst free software for the charts. You can't input a time for a transit or progression which could skew the houses on a progressed chart, they don't do primary directions, and no doubt other limitations.

I am posting 4 charts: 3 in Placidus using modern astrology, and one in whole signs using just the traditional 7 planets. I don't mean to short-change whole-sign advocates, so with the birth data provided please post additional charts if you feel they make your case.

Dr. Farr, a special thanks to you for your teaching moments on traditional astrology. Hopefully you, MOS, JupiterAsc and others will interpret this important moment using the whole sign house system-- or other traditional techniques.

I'll come up with some modern interpretations in my next post here.

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dr. farr responded to your hopes as follows

dr. farr said:

Well, an initial couple of observations:
Centering on her defacto elevation to queen upon the death of her father in 1952:
-by Pauline profection of the ascendant, her ascendant profected into her natal 1st whole sign house in 1952, disposited by Saturn, which had also profected back to its natal place in the 11th whole sign house of friends and the Good Spirit AND CONJUNCT HER NATAL MC IN THAT 11TH HOUSE
-the dispositor of that 11th house, Mars, had also profected back to its natal position in Aquarius, disposited by Saturn, so in this profection chart for 1952 Saturn and Mars were in mutual reception
-now, using Pauline profection* to the month of her father's death and her defacto elevation to queen, advancing the ascendant 1 sign (through the natal chart) for each month, for the period Jaunary 21-February 21, the profected ascendant falls in Libra in the 10th whole sign house of honors and elevations, and the profected ascendant is sign conjunct the Part of Fortune: certainly seems indicative of what actually happened; yet when we look at the Placidus natal, the 10th house cusp is in Scorpio, not Libra; the Part of Fortune is in Libra in the Placidus 9th house, not the 10th of honors and advancement...
These are just a couple of things which jump out at me in a superficial look at the natal by profection; but in that whole sign Libra on the 10th with the Part of Fortune profection of the ascendant in the January 21-February 21 period, I suggest we see a closer approximation to what actually happened at that time, than from the Placidus format, which puts the 10th under Scorpio, and puts the January 21-February 21 time period in the 9th house (along with the Part of Fortune in the 9th house), which to me does not seem as descriptive of what actually happened to Elizabeth during that period of time...

(*Pauline profection uses a different start-point in the count of years, than other systems of profection, such as the well-known Egyptian profection method)

Month to month profection (a sub-section of the Pauline annual profection method)
In this chart, (all are based on counting of the natal signs/houses):
April 21-May 21 1951 = 1st house (Capricorn)
May 21-June 21 1951 = 2nd house (Aquarius)
June 21-July 21 1951 = 3rd house (Pisces)
July 21-August 21 1951 = 4th house (Aries)
August 21-September 21 1951 = 5th house (Taurus)
September 21-October 21 1951 = 6th house (Gemini)
October 21-November 21 1951 = 7th house (Cancer)
November 21 -December 21 1951 = 8th house (Leo)
December 21 1951-January 21 1952 = 9th house (Virgo)
EVENT PERIOD January 21-February 21 1952 (includes time of event February 8th, 1952) = 10th house (Libra)

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some excellent delineation

dr. farr said:

In comparing results of whole sign vs Placidus (and, by the way all other quadrant house formats) applied to Queen Elizabeth's profected chart, notice this:
-the Pauline profection to the monthly time period of the event (her father's death) and her elevation to Queen, falls in Libra (by any house system, and by no house system, like in Cosmobiologie)
-however, we are considering domification here in this thread
-now, in quadrant systems (like Placidus), the profection to the month of the event, falls in the 9th house; there is truth in the indications drawn from this 9th house, because in fact the event, the death of her father, did in fact make her, defacto, head of the Church of England, certainly a valid 9th house affinity
-but, in whole sign (exclusively) the profection of the ascendant to the month of the critical event, falls in the 10th house: rulership of the nation is affinitive to the 10th, head of government also, as well as the "highest advancement", which becoming Queen (of a constitutional monarchy) certainly is!
-now, here is the point: which house is MORE specific to the level/qaulity of what actually happened? Which house is more "pertinent" to what happened? The 9th, becoming head of the Church of England, or the 10th, becoming Queen of England, head of the government, rising up in the greatest advancement possible (in a monarchy)?

And that is my point; not that the houses of quadrant formats are wrong-not at all; but rather, that, often, the whole sign houses are MORE specific, more descriptive of what actually IS, than the quadrant methods yield in their house indications; and NOT always, maybe not even most of the time, but, I say, OFTEN, and I have in fact frequently found this to be the case.
Couple more examples, along this line of thinking, to follow.

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dr. farr continues as promised

dr. farr said:

Looking at the posted SR chart, the Lot of Sudden Advancement (ascendant+sun-saturn) falls @ 0 Aquarius: now, in placidus this Lot falls in the 7th house; in whole sign it falls IN THE 8th HOUSE, connecting her sudden advancement with death (the death of her father); again, I submit this whole sign placement of her Lot of Sudden Advancement, in the 8th house, is MORE SPECIFIC to the nature of what actually happened, than its placement in the 7th house (by quadrant house formats)

Also note that the 8th house is the HOUSE OF INHERITANCE, and the Lot of Sudden Advancement falling here (in the whole sign 8th house) certainly is specific to her having inherited the Crown of England from her deceased father.

(Interesting that the SR based Lot of Sudden Advancement, falls in Aquarius, where, by simple symbolic progression of her natal, her ascending degree has also progressed to at the time of her father's death and her subsequent sudden advancement to Queen; note also that the progressed ascendant of the natal and the SR placement of the Lot of Sudden Advancement both fall in Aquarius, the EXACT SUN SIGN-time of the year-when the event ACTUALLY occured, ie, February 6th, Sun in AQUARIUS!)

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Dr. Farr, I respectfully disagree. I looked up my copy of Manilius, Astronomica (1st century AD) this morning. It is clear to me that he uses a quadrant house system, and that he also refers to an 8-house system. He calls our "houses" "temples"--at least in English translation. Firmicus Maternus (ca. 280-360 AD) also gives an 8-house system as well as a 12-house system.

I don't have time to go into the details on Manilius's use of a quadrant house system now, but I will this evening, with specific references cited. For any night-owls living in western North America or any early-birds in Australia, perhaps we could all tune in and have a discussion!

The other point that has to be made is that the whole mindset or world-view of houses seems to have been different in antiquity. Arguably lunar mansions, which were known back then, form a kind of house system, but then they were based on a very different methodology than we think about houses today. You are correct about the antiquity of "smaller" divisions like decans and faces, but these don't validate, in and of themselves, the ubiquity of whole-sign house systems. Themes of life that we apply to houses, in antiquity might be based more upon the specific relationships between planets and on the "lots" or what moderns call the Arabic parts. (These predated the rise of Near Eastern Astrology.) Some classical authors say so little about houses and so much about other methods of determining arenas of life that houses in general seem unimportant to them. For years historians of astrology thought that Ptolemy used an equal house system, not a whole sign system: he is that brief and vague about houses.

The notion that there was ever a single, unified set of beliefs and practices involving the whole-sign system in antiquity is not historically accurate.

But again, if anyone wants to use the whole sign system and feels that it produces superior results--that's super. I think which house system to use is largely a matter of personal preference.

JupiterAsc, I take your lengthy post as your declining to validate with your own chart interpretations your belief in the superiority of the whole sign house system.

waybread said:

JupiterAsc, I take your lengthy post as your declining to validate with your own chart interpretations your belief in the superiority of the whole sign house system.

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Déjà Vu
Perhaps you have understood after reading said post that the matter has already been discussed at this link http://www.astrologyweekly.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39669:smile:

byjove said:

Hello all,

I'm looking to learn more about how whole sign methods are getting on today. I know all the usual links to the librarising/Chris Brennan etc. but what's the latest news? I see more and more astrologers on here taking up whole signs. Are there any more sites online using them than 5 years ago? I'm getting tired of going to my favourite sites and having to change 10 options just fit my current astrological beliefs. Does anyone here use Solar fire or other astro. programs that they would recommend?

I started digging into astrology's history a few years ago, and found many situations where mistranslations and misunderstandings and of course religious/other support helped proliferate methods etc. and as a result I've been happy to find original teachings - I find that liberating (from confusion). It also seems to me that if a person learns astrology today, they can be learning a method of astrology which has strayed far from what was originally meant! The navigator starts off with a minimal error in location data, but as he moves on, that small error results in arriving in the wrong destination!

What do users of whole sign think about the outer planets? While I think it's also true to say that not all improvements/research/experience in astrology since the ancients is invalid, I think we ought to decide ourselves what of the outer planets. I'm also aware that they don't have the same scrutiny of study that the rest of the planets have. I don't think that the ancients would have simply discounted them on that basis though, and it makes me uncomfortable to pretend they're not there! So do any whole sign users here use outers? (even as just generational in effect). Either way, at some point I think we ought to get out of the ancient's minds and decide for ourselves.

Personally I'm also open to 'improvements' on aspects, in particular orbs. What's tried and tested is respectable, but nothing stands still in time. If in the last 2,000 years experience has shown that an 8 degree square is not effectual, but a tighter orb of 6 degrees is, then even if it's contrary to older traditions, I think it ought to be taken into account.

Just curious!

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Regarding the outer planets http://www.astrologyweekly.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39021

Ah, good discussion on the outers, thanks!

OK, sports fans. I found out a bunch of material, which I will divide up into several posts.

First off, the basis of the whole sign system appears to be an assumption that the passage of the sun through each sign takes up 2 hours of a 24-hour day. We recall that the houses in a horoscope are essentially stationary, whereas the signs appear to rotate through them. For example the point of the ascendant and descendant are fixed on the horizon, regardless of which sign rotates through them in the course of a 24-hour period. Since the Babylonian era, however, star-gazers knew that rising signs did not necessarily take up exactly two hours.

Whether they went ahead and used whole signs anyway in astrology is a different question, and one that is more difficult to answer definitively; mostly because the astrologers of antiquity [that I've read, anyway] didn't clarify how they determined their house cusps. We can only infer one house system or another by ferreting through what they wrote.

The following information is mostly taken from James Evans, History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy (1998, Oxford University Press.) Portions of it are available on google books. Unfortunately it's got some holes in the available pages, but there's enough there to get the gist.

p. 39. By the 6th century BC, the Babylonians were using 30-degree signs. They were using degrees by the 3rd century BC (p. 124.) They had a basic unit of measurement of 60, which seems to have been incorporated into their astrology.

The Babylonians realized, as we do, that there were differences in the number of daylight hours between summer and winter. [These are most extreme at the solstices in higher latitudes, due to the fact that the ecliptic is tilted relative to the equator: tjhe ecliptic is roughly 23 degrees off the terrestrial equator the solstices but equal at the equinoxes.]

They divided their charts into 3 "watches" based on the names of 3 gods, and then further divided the 3 watches into 4 sectors. (p.11) While this created a sort of 12-house system, it wasn't based on anything like the house systems of the Hellenized/Roman world. They recognized that the day watches were longer than the night watches in summer, with the reverse being true in winter.

So right off the bat we have trouble in equating 12 two-hour periods fitting neatly into a whole signs chart where 6 signs should be above the horizon (AS/DC axis) and 6 signs should be below the horizon, with what people actually observed.

At the latitude of that astrological hot-bed of Alexandria, Egypt (31N, comparable to New Oreans, LA or El Paso, TX), for example, at the summer solstice the daylight lasts for 14 hours, and darkness lasts for 10 hours.

So in the matter of calculating the width of the rising sign at a particular latitude and date (say, the summer solstice), astrologers had to divide up the upper hemisphere signs amongst 14 hours for 6 signs, and 10 hours for the lower-hemisphere signs. We do not get neat 2-hour sign periods with this kind of simple arithmetic.

So right away the Babylonians understood the concept of signs taking up various amounts of band-width on the ecliptic, even with standard 30-degree signs instead of contellations.

The thread of this story picks up with the Greeks, and one Hipsicles (ca. 190-120 BC) who was living in Alexandria, Egypt (Evans, pp. 121-124). Based on the earlier work of the Babylonians, he set out to formulate an arithmetic model that would account for differences in the degree widths or sun-passage times of the signs, enabling the degree of the ascendant to be determined.

Basically the rising times of signs increase arithmetically from Aries (equinox) to the solstice, and then decline arithmetically to Pisces, when we're back to Aries again. At Hipsicles' latitude, for example, Aries might be the rising sign for an hour and a half, while Virgo would then take close to 2.5 hours.

Hipsicles's time/degree divisions based on simple arithmetic were pretty good. Ptolemy (2nd century AD) reworked the problem, using trigonometry, which had been developed by his day. The two men's calculations were close, but slightly different.

The Roman astrology author Manilius (Astronomica) in the 1st century AD had apparently learned of two Babylonian systems to deal with the problem of differing daylight and night lengths through the seasons relative to signs, although he confused them. One operated by a simple arithmetic progression (time T1 =T, T2=T+x, T3=T+2x, T4=t++3x....) whereas the other made a bigger adjustment between Gemini/Cancer and between Sagittarius/Capricorn.

The whole sign system normally includes the exact degree of the ascendant, but buries it within the first house, unless the ascendant just happens coincidentally to be at 0 degrees of the rising sign. The sign-house correspondence with whole signs suggests a precise match-up with 30-degree widths for both signs and houses. Which isn't exactly what one notices in locations significantly north or south of the equator. Moreover, if your ascendant is in a late degree of its sign, it makes no sense to bury it deeply into the first house, because the lower hemisphere indicates night-time. It suggests it could be into 1.5 hours or more of darkness. Yet the ascendant degree indicates the point where it breaks free into the upper hemisphere of day time.

For anyone wanting a more "natural" or visually based type of astrology, therefore, either we need something other than equal whole signs matching 30-degree houses; or we need to allow more than one sign to take up parts of houses.

More soon on what I think was Manilius's quadrant-based house system.

+In the Loeb Library edition of "Astronomica", in the introduction, the editors show that the "octoptropis" mentioned in the book is a later interpolation by a different author (than Manilius), and there are several such interpolations in the work.
Further, they show that the octotropis of Firmicus Maternus is merely the first 8 house/place allocations (derived from Valens, not from Manilius) going from life (1st house/place) to death (8th house/place) They further show that this could NOT have been taken from Manilius, as, in the Manilius elaboration of places (houses) the 7th place (NOT the 8th) is assigned by Manilius to death. The mentioning of an octotropis by Paulus Alexandrianus is from the same listing of 8 places/houses of a 12 house/place chart- from the 1st place/house (life) to the 8th place/house (death), as mentioned by Paulus contemporary, Firmicus Maternus (please see the "octotropis" discussion in the editorial introduction to the Loeb Library edition of the "Astronomica")

-there is no mention of "octotropis" in the other Greco/Roman literature-nothing about it in Doothues of Sidon, Valens, Anubion, Antiochus, Maximus, Manetho, Hephaestio (these are the authors I have read, from the "CAG") nor in the early Islamic transitional era literature (late 8th early 9th century) which largely re-stated the earlier Greco/Roman astrological doctrines (eg, in Sahl, Massalah, nor in Abu Mashar, whose "Greater Introduction" is pretty much a complete resume of earlier Greco/Roman concepts and methods) Note that these early Islamic-transitional era authors, uniformly followed the whole sign house format
(within a 100 years the quadrant Rhetorius/Alchabitius house format totally replaced the older whole sign house format)

-there is no mention of "octotropis" in the "Yavanesvara" of Sphujidhraja, 149 AD, which is an epitomization of Greek astrological doctrines introduced into India (and having significant influences upon the evolution of Vedic astrology), and in which book the concept of sign=house(place) is clearly evident (see Pingree's 2 volume study of "Yavanesvara")

-"octotropis" is not mentioned either in the "Brihat Samhita" nor in the "Brihat Jataka" of Varahamihira (6th century India), both of which books contain material on Greco/Roman astrological thought, especially so the "Brihat Jataka", which books of astrological concepts and methodology was much influenced (according to Pingree) by Greco/Roman astrological concepts and practices. Note also that the erection of horoscopes in "Brihat Jatak" is sign=house (rashi=bhava), ie, essentially whole sign (Vedic astrology mostly switched to the related Equal house format a couple hundred years later)

Notice also in the historical literature there can be found no discussions whatsoever concerning "dodecatropis vs octotropis" (12 place vs 8 place charts) Quite simply, except for the spurious (interpolated) reference to octotropis in Manilius, and a brief mention of octotropis (being merely the first 8 places/houses of a 12 place/house chart) in Maternus and Paulus, the concept is completely absent in the available original document literature of those times; there is next to nothing to support the proposition that octotropic horoscopic charts (8 place/house charts) were actually used by ancient practitioners for delineative purposes except a bit of evidence that it was applied but in symbolic Fortunata charts.

The following material on Manilius, Astronomica (written in Latin ca. 10 AD) isn't intended to dissuade fans of the whole sign system from using it if they think it produces superior interpretations. Rather, it is to suggest that multiple house systems were probably in use in antiquity, close to the earliest known period of house usage of any form in Greek and Roman astrology. Deborah Houlding, a traditional astrologer, in her book The Houses, Temples of the Sky, p. 7 states that Astronomica is the earliest extant book that describes astrological houses. Manilius relied on earlier sources, but they no longer exist.

Houlding further notes (p. 95) that Manilius's division of the heavens seemed to include the whole visible cosmos, not just the zodiacal signs or constellations along the ecliptic. So this is one area where an early classical author's understanding of houses would differ from our understanding of the whole sign house system.

I am working from my hard copy of the G. P. Goold translation/Loeb Classical Library edition of Astronomica. An excerpted version of it is available on-line as a google book.

In book 5, Manilius gives a whole range of constellations that astrologers should consider together with rising signs. In the vicinity of Aries, for example, he mentions specific degrees that correspond with the rising of particular constellations, each of which imparts its qualities to the native, and usually (although not exclusively) in ways that simply mimic the myths and pictures of the constellations. For example, (5:57) the Charioteer rises at 15 degrees Aries, and it gives its sons proficiency in chariot-driving and being a "trick rider." At 20 degrees Aries, the stars known as "the Kids" rise, and they confer a goat-like nature and abilities for shepherds.

While the occupational predictions seem rather silly today, it is worth noting that Manilius records very specific astronomical phenomena happening with specific degrees on the ascendant. Clearly his rising signs were not empty space, even if untenanted by planets. The ascendant degree can be known and it matters.

Manilius's discussion of houses, as is common today, follows the diurnal motion of the sun, not the seasonal progress of the signs.

In Book 2:788-800, Manilius defines the four cardinal points, or angles, much as we would define them today. These are "fixed and receive in succession the speeding signs." The MC is the highest point of the sun in the sky. The AC/DC axis indicate the rising and setting sun. The IC or nadir is where the stars "complete their descent and commence their return..."

So right here we have the concept of changeable positions for the 2 principal axes, because the sun doesn't peak at the same place in the heavens through the course of the seasons; nor does it rise generically within a sign, but rather that particular degrees.

In 2: 808ff, Manilius gives precedence to the MC as the most important of the angles, and indicates qualities proper to the "domains" of the 10th and 4th houses (honours, recognition, fame; and wealth and mining, respectively.) He then goes on to describe the ascendant's house (1st's) qualities, followed by the 7th. These angular houses, by virtue of their association with the prominent points in the sun's passage, are the strongest houses in the horoscope. (This idea is still popular in traditional astrology.) Manilius (2:829) clearly says that the Greeks call the degree of the rising sign "the horoscope."

The main point here is the association of the angular houses with the angles. In contrast, in the whole sign system, you could get a MC appearing in the 9th or 11th houses, which carry very different meanings.

Next (2:841ff) Manilius says we have to look at the space between the angles, or quadrants. He links these to four stages of human life.

2:856ff: "In any geniture every sign is affected by the sky's division into temples [houses]....The temple that is immediately above the Horoscope [i.e., degree of the ascendant] and is the next but one to heaven's zenith [MC] is a temple of ill omen, hostile to future activity [12th]....like unto it will prove the abode which...shines below the occident [DC] and adjacent to it [6th house.]"

This passage suggests that the 12th house starts immediately above the actual degree of the ascendant, not at 0 degrees of the sign in the first house, as would be the case with the whole sign system. Similarly, the 6th house commences just beneath the degree of the descendant.

Manilius goes on to describe the nature of the other houses, sometimes in ways similar to current understandings, sometimes differently. It is not clear how he divides the succedant and cadent houses. What seems clear, however, is that the scaffolding of Manilius's temples is a quadrant system, not a whole-sign system.

There is no time assumption relative to the Sun passage in whole sign house; the assumption is merely that signs are 30 degrees each in ecliptic longitude, and that the PLACE of the sign in the sequence 1 through 12, defines what the sign means: for example, whatever degree of Pisces rises the moment of the first breath of a newborn, immediately a circle of 12 places including and following the sign Pisces imprints upon the field of that newborn. The first place is Pisces, and defines the essence of that being; the next sign (= place) defines the nature of the material possession possibilites of that being, and Aries defines that; the next sign (= place) defines the relationship with brothers/sisters of that being, and that is described/defined/epitomized by Taurus, and so on around the dodecatropos (original term for the 12 PLACES-notice that PLACE is what is stated in the term, NOT "house" which would give the term dodecadomi, which term is completely absent from the ancient literature)
Now, NONE of this has to do with lengths of signs in time-ie, the signs of long ascendsion and short ascension (which reverse depending upon the location being in the northern or southern hemisphere) Now, determining angularity is another matter, and here the quadrant points (asc,MC,DC,IC) comes into play, and here we have significant variations based upon latitude (due to the system being centered on the ecliptic rather than on the equator, like ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astrology was, and like Chinese astrology continues to be) The Greco/Romans called these the ascensional points, points after them were called post-ascensional, and points before them were called pre-ascensional. Valens used these quadrants for measuring angularity in determination of strength and weakness, but in the laying-out of horoscopic charts, the 12 segment chain of 30 degree signs = places (whole sign; sign/house) was used.

There is substantial literature to the effect that "horoscope" meant the "hour observer" and was applied to the ascendant; that would be to the ascendant sign; "horoscopic point" was frequently used as a qualifying term to refer to any POINT in the map, and most frequently used in application to the ascending DEGREE. In a reading of Manilius descriptions of signs/places, it is clear that when using the generic term "horoscope" he was referring-as the Greco/Romans consistently did when using that term-to the the ASCENDING SIGN. He would have used the term "point" to qualify the term "horoscope" if he had intended to describe the ascending DEGREE...

The "octotropos" or 8-house division appears in Firmicus Maternus, Atheseos Libri VIII. I have a hard copy of the Jean Rhys Bram translation (1975, reprinted 2005, publisher Astrology Classics.) He was a Sicilian who wrote in Latin and lived ca. 280-360 AD.

Book 2 sec. XIV is titled The Eight Houses. Maternus wrote (paragraph 1): "A little later... we shall show in detail the way in which the individual houses may be exactly located.

(para. 3) "In general The House of Life is in the sign in which the ascendant is located; of Expectation of Inheritance and Wealth in the second house from the ascendant;..." He gives siblings to the 3rd house, parents to the 4th, children to the 5th, health to the 6th, spouses to the 7th, and death to the 8th.

This sounds so familiar that we might assume that Maternus simply forgot about the remaining 12 houses, except that he reiterates his 8-fold division:

"Beginning from the ascendant we have listed all the houses by name: Life, Expectations of Wealth, Brothers and Sisters, Parents, Children, Health, Spouse, Death."

Eight again.

Interestingly, Maternus does not appear to use a quadrant system.

He follows in sec. XV with what does appears to be a whole sign system using 12 houses. The degree of the ascendant must be calculated, but first he says then the MC is simply the 10th house from the ascendant. He notes that the descendent is 180 degrees from the descendant.

Then we get a different take on the degree of the MC:

(para. 4) "The Medium Caelum is the tenth house from the ascendant, but sometimes also the MC is found exactly in the 11th sign from the ascendant. In order to understand this more clearly, compute, starting from the degree of the ascendant, through the other following signs [i.e. counter-clockwise] and in whatever sign the 271st degree is found, this is alotted to the Medium Caelum."

Frankly, it is hard to know what to make of Goold's (1977) translation of Manilius's mention of the octotropos (8-house system) in 2: 968-70. The translator took serious exception to other 20th century authors claiming to see an 8-house division mentioned in Astronomica; so much so that although the word octotropos clearly appears in the Latin text, but has been turfed out of the main portion of the English translation! It does appear in a footnote: "The founder of astrology gave to this section the title of Octotropos; the motions of the planets, which fly through it in the opposite direction, shall follow at the proper place." [Say what?]

Have you come across mention of an 8-house system in Antiochus? It's getting late: I don't have time to track it down now.

Pity I don't read Latin. Does anyone here?

Dr. Farr, you might be correct, however. This man agrees with you: www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/aoctobj.htm . But then what do you make of the Babylonian 16-house system shown in Houlding's book?

Just one last point on the debatable ubiquity of the whole sign system in antiquity before I konk out for the night: please consider Deborah Houlding's chapter on Ptolemy's use and non-use of houses in her book The Houses: Temples of the Sky.

She notes that Mr. Pt says so little about houses that he seemed to be deliberately avoiding the topic. Themes that even other classical astrologers ascribed to houses, he attributes to other factors such as planetary positions or lots.

In his book III:10, on determining the length of life, he says regarding "the twelfth part of the zodiac surrounding the horoscope [ascendant], from 5 degrees above the actual horizon up to the 25 degrees that remains, which rising in succession to the horizon...." Hen then goes on to identify, by relationship to the first house the "house of the good daemon" [11th house], as well as the 10th, 9th, and 7th houses. Thus some astrologers have suggested a "classical house system" which is basically an equal house (though not whole sign) system in which houses begin at 5 degrees of each sign.

Houlding (p. 115_ cites Mr. Pt's contemporary Antiochus, who said, "Each of these 12 places obtains as its lot the 5 pre-ascended degrees and the 25 post-ascending degrees..." if the angles are at 90 degrees (right angles.) But if the angles have different numbers of degrees, divide "the degrees of the square numbers equally into three parts, and you would know how many degrees each place of the zodiac has."

Vettius Valens's own commentary on Ptolemy suggests an equal house system (book 9 ch. 3).

p. 122. Ptolemy also refers to the serious problems of determining birth time with the inefficient instruments of his day (2:2). This suggests that any use of the whole sign system was not because the astrologers of antiquity were enamoured of it, but because it was too chancy to believe that a birth time calculated with water clocks or gnomons was correct.

Had a very lengthy further comment and information , but the AW system timed it out and when I tried to post it, it vanished! Will not attempt to post this extensive material again (spent over an hour on it but the AW system timed it out)

Waybread, I enjoyed this discussion!

Basically we both agree that the antiquity or modernity of a domification format does not make any difference-that how well that fomat works for the person using it, and how reliable it is for that practitioner, is all that matters.

Our discussion here is mostly of an academic, historical nature:
-Waybread's view is that in antiquity there were a number of different house systems, and that none were universal or predominant, pretty much like the situation is today. Waybread has presented some evidence and excellent discussions to support this view, and it is a very reasonable point of view!

-Based on my own studies I cannot agree with that point of view. I believe that both in the West and as far East as India, there once was a universal (or nearly so) domification format-whole sign-with very few deviating from it for delineative purposes; that a modification of whole sign, Equal house, MIGHT have become a secondary house system (Ptolemy maybe, Firmicus Maternus too) and that this did in fact supplant whole sign in the East (India) around the 7th century AD.
I believe that in the West, by the beginning of the 6th century AD, whole sign was beginning to lose its predominance to the first quadrant house system, "Porphyry", and that by the late 9th century had become entirely supplanted by the quadrant based Rhetorius/Alchabitius house format, with some in Medieval Europe continuing with the earlier Porphyry format.
Certainly, in Western astrology, quadrant based domification formats have predominated over the past 1200 years, the ancient whole sign house format becoming known again in the West only since the late 1990's, and in very limited use (maybe 3-5% of practitioners at most) at the present time.
..I, of course, am one of those few...

Caprising said:

While not trying to confuse you more, consider how the "unknown planets (the outers)/asteroids" would have skewed the interpretation of various systems developed in the past! ...we are now in a position to potentially discover an astrological system that wouldn't have been possible to discover in the past...astrologers have more rescources at their/our disposal than probably ever before....

Click to expand...

T'is true! And Uranian Astrology is an prime example of this. They use all imaginary planets, completely mathematically calculated and based on emperical evidence. So, people can gum-flap all day about what they think should work. At the end of the day, discounting the human's natural tendency to err, we have to look at what is working.

Also, the thing is, for example, Uranian Astrology, though based completely on imaginary planets and theoretical points, is a complete and whole system unto itself. It works but it doesn't work outside of its OWN system. Hence it is for the rest of astrology; it all works, but only within it's own context for which it was originally designed.

You can't take a fish out of water and blame the fish for not working. If that is the basic thing we all come to understand we have all just made a quantum leap in evolution, I think.

Blessings,

Anachiel